Large view of a Dagestan village opening from the terrace of a traditional house. It was drawn by a Ukrainian born artist in the historically important period for this Caucasian region when it enjoyed a short-lived independence.

Located in the North Caucasus, Dagestan came under full Russian control at the end of the Russo-Persian War in 1828. However, the Empire struggled to retain control over the ethnically diverse region and in 1917 Dagestan, Ingushetia and Chechnya declared independence from Russia and formed a single state "United Mountain Dwellers of the North Caucasus". The capital of the new state was moved to Temir-Khan-Shura in Dagestan. The state existed only for four years until in 1921 Russians occupied the country to incorporate it into the newly created Soviet state.

Lochakow studied painting in Odessa, later fighting as an officer in the Russian Army during the First World War. He settled in Paris in 1920 and exhibited his works in various Salons. Living in seclusion and suffering from ill health, he died in 1941.

The drawing comes from a private collection of Sarkis Boghossian and was published in his monumental work "Armenian Iconography" that gathers ____ prints and drawings on the subject.

Boghossian's biography resembles a thriller novel. Born in 1921 in a small Armenian village in today's Turkey, Boghossian was taken to Marseille at the age of six by his family that fled famine and oppression. Passionate about art, poetry and Armenian culture, he chose a career of bookseller. In 1967 Boghossian opened a rare bookshop in Paris, "Le XIXe siècle", specialising in rare books and engravings related to Armenia.

In autumn 1998 the French booksellers' community woke up to shocking news that Boghossian had been found dead in his Parisian flat, tortured and murdered, with a number of valuable books missing from the apartment. Police quickly traced the murderer, who, however, hardly resembled the idea one may have of an assassin. He was a French bookseller of Turkish origin and a renowned scholar with a PhD from Sorbonne specialising in Ottoman and Armenian history. He was apparently in dispute with Boghossian over a number of rare books that the latter kept as a guarantee against a cash loan. The bookseller was arrested and subsequently sentenced to 19 years in prison just when he was due to give a lecture at a conference in Nice titled "The Armenian merchants in the Mediterranean in the eighteenth century".

Charcoal on paper (47 x 63 cm), signed.

Sarkis Boghossian "Armenian Iconography II" reproduces No. 889 p.151 - Paris, 1998.